The world hasn't been kind to Sun for quite a while now, but with the economic downturn, things are getting worse. Sun announced today that it will be laying off 18% of its workforce, or about 6000 people. In addition, it was announced that Sun's software chief Rich Green has resigned for reasons that were not stated, although as part of Sun's reorganization and cost cutting efforts, many departments are being merged, and the software division is being restructured and reorganized.

Even if 10 times as many x86 servers were cheaper, they require more administration, power, repairs and that cost money too.

I think one of the problems is that SUN can not sell to many of these boxes to a customer, they are too powerful for multi threaded work.

STRATA (europe's second largest web host) that handles 1 billion email/day migrated their whole back end to one Niagara T5440 box.

In SAP official benchmark, one T5440 using 4 Niagara cpus at 1.4GHz achieves 14,000points. IBM's "superfast" new Power6 cpu at 4.7GHz achieves 7,000points. But IBM used 3 servers, in total 12 cpus. Compare that against 4 Niagara 1.4GHz on one machine, running virtual Solaris instances.

No, there are not many customers that need two of these T5440 monsters. One of these can consolidate many servers. And they are far cheaper than IBM, for instance.

SUN is the only big dinosaur that has opened up all their high technology. Microsoft has not done that. Nor Apple. IBM, SAP, Oracle. etc. If SUN bankrupts, no one else will dare to open up their entire portfolio as SUN has. How clever is it to give away everything, instead of selling it? If SUN is successful, other large companies will consider opening up all their portfolio.